In March, I wrote about Gawker\u2019s new quantity-over-quality experiment. Each day, one Gawker staffer was tasked with pageview-chasing duty, a quest to post enough cat videos, Miley Cyrus pics, and local news ephemera to keep the clicks coming en masse. That staffer\u2019s work would free up others to work on longer, more involved pieces. Pageview duty rotated, because \u2014 who could stare too long into the Internet\u2019s bright raw id and not go blind?<\/p>\n
Neetzan Zimmerman, apparently. Editor A.J. Daulerio hired him two months ago to focus exclusively on viral content. Zimmerman\u2019s title at Gawker is Editor, The Internet. He is assigned to cover the Internet.<\/p>\n
This machine-like person has generated more than 300 bylines for Gawker since he started on April 9. These are not lengthy tomes, usually; nearly every post is just a funny photo or video, with body text barely longer than a caption. The average word count of a sampling of his recent stories is about 200.<\/p>\n
Zimmerman sits comfortably atop Gawker\u2019s leaderboard, garnering two to five times more pageviews than his highest-performing colleagues. Zimmerman is so prolific, his posts so magnetic, that Daulerio has now relieved all 10 full-time Gawker staffers of their pageview chores.<\/p>\n
via What makes something go viral? The Internet according to Gawker\u2019s Neetzan Zimmerman \u00bb Nieman Journalism Lab<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In March, I wrote about Gawker\u2019s new quantity-over-quality experiment. Each day, one Gawker staffer was tasked with pageview-chasing duty, a quest to post enough cat videos, Miley Cyrus pics, and local news ephemera to keep the clicks coming en masse. That staffer\u2019s work would free up others to work on longer, more involved pieces. Pageview … Continue reading What makes something go viral? The Internet according to Gawker\u2019s Neetzan Zimmerman \u00bb Nieman Journalism Lab<\/span>